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Almost 80% of all design decisions are taken in the first 20% of the design
time. Thus, an early and substantiated knowledge about possible solutions is
mandatory to design high quality systems. Aiding in this critical design phase
is the mission of SystemCoDesigner. It is a software tool for automatic design
space exploration at the electronic system level. Additionally,
SystemCoDesigner generates platform-based prototyps of (mixed)
hardware/software systems. By exploring the design space, a designer becomes
more confident in decisions to be done. To sum up, SystemCoDesigner is a novel
EDA tool which covers all aspects from (i) specification over (ii) automatic
exploration to (iii) automatic prototype implementation.
The input to SystemCoDesigner is a functional model written in SystemC. Each
SystemC module in these models can be refined to different hardware or software
implementations. Hardware synthesis can be done using high-level synthesis
tools, while software is directly generated from the high-level SystemC model.
In the exploration phase, the goal is to optimally allocate resources and bind
the SystemC modules onto these allocated resources. During exploration,
evaluatin of candidate designs is performed through SystemC simulation. These
automatically generated system level performance models permit a fast
estimation of latency and throughput numbers by a combined behavioral and
timing simulation considering allocation and binding effects. The result of
the exploration is a set of Pareto-optimized designs corresponding to different
hardware/software implementations. After decision making, i.e., selecting a
suitable design out of the optimized set, a prototype implementation of the
resulting hardware/software system can be generated. As a proof of concept, the
mapping onto Xilinx FPGAs using Xilinx Micro-Blaze softcore processors and
automatically synthesized hardware components has been successfully performed
for several case-studies.
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